Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
Published 1996 · 447 pages · 110,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction
How hard is Angela's Ashes to read?
Angela's Ashes scores 24 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 28 out of 100
- Irish English with Limerick dialect. Simple vocabulary with rich voice.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Abstraction: 20 out of 100
- Entirely concrete. A child's-eye view.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Dense with sensory detail and emotional specificity.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- The child narrator doesn't understand what the adult reader does.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- Rain, the river Shannon, and the Angel on the Seventh Step are recurring images.
- Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
- The gap between the child's innocence and the reader's understanding creates sustained irony.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- McCourt escapes to America. The memoir ends with departure, not arrival.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Chronological memoir from birth to emigration.
How Angela's Ashes is regarded
Angela's Ashes holds a literary regard score of 54 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.